The Paper Gardens

Howl's Moving Castle - now Aladdin flavored, with 40% more human transformations!

I was having a lot of fun reading Castle in the Air. Abdullah was such an unlikely hero, and his attempts to speed his quest up by challenging Fate to get his love, Flower-in-the-Night back often ended in hilarity.

The ending of the book made the story, though.

Once you find out who was what the whole time, the entire story takes on a different level of amusement. You'll go back over the story in hindsight, and every single interaction will take on new meanings. And trust me - there's a lot of people being changed into things.

The story itself expands upon the world of the first book - instead of being set just in Ingary, we get to see glimpses of Zanzib and Strangia, whose cultures differ greatly from that of Ingary. It made the book feel bigger than the first one, simply because of scale.

Castle in the Air at once manages to be a sequel and its own tale, and while I don't think it's better than the first book, it can definitely hold its on in the world of sequels.